Chinese Vessel Will Map Ocean Floor in Search for Missing Jet

HONG KONG — The Malaysian government announced late Monday night that a Chinese vessel would survey the ocean floor at the last suspected location of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Hydrographic experts from Malaysia, China and Australia met over the weekend in Canberra, the capital of Australia, and agreed that extensive mapping of the sea floor would be done by a Chinese Navy vessel, said Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who is also Malaysia’s acting transport minister. Accurate mapping could help in the future deployment of further deep-sea submersibles to the area to look for the vanished jet.

The suspected location lies 550 miles west-northwest of Exmouth, a town on the northwestern corner of Australia. It is well within international waters.

Australia has nonetheless led the search until now, under authority delegated to it by Malaysia as the lead government in the search for the missing Boeing 777-200, which disappeared on March 8. The United States has made a point of sending a deep-sea submersible and other gear to be operated from the deck of an Australian ship.

China has been seeking a larger role in the investigation. Its citizens made up two-thirds of the 227 passengers, while the 12-person crew was entirely Malaysian.

The extreme depth of the waters where the plane disappeared, exceeding 15,000 feet in places, has been blamed by searchers for making the aircraft exceptionally hard to find. So has the hilly sea floor rived by deep gullies and buried in silt, resulting in calls by the searchers for better maps of the sort that the Chinese vessel, the Zhu Kezhen, is now supposed to produce.

Mr. Hussein also said that Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation would talk with Inmarsat, the global satellite communications company, about a possible release of raw data transmitted from the aircraft to a satellite over the Indian Ocean. Technical details of how that data reached the satellite were used to calculate the suspected location, but many of those details have not been released.

Mr. Hussein said that the next of kin of some passengers had sought the raw data. But the information might also be of use to intelligence services in China and elsewhere that might want to use such data to track aircraft movements.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Malaysia: Chinese Vessel to Map Sea Floor in Hunt for Missing Jet. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe